Download Race and the Enlightenment part II

Race and the Enlightenment part II: The
Anglo-French Enlightenment and beyond
American left communist Loren Goldner's history of the origins of race and racism. Part Two
of Two.
Part one ¦ Part two
Quote:
"The animal is immediately one with its life activity, nor distinct from it. The animal is its life
activity. Man makes his life activity itself into an object of will and consciousness. It is not a
determination with which he immediately identifies. (The animal)...produces in a one-sided
way while man produces universally...The animal only produces itself while man reproduces
the whole of nature."
-Karl Marx, 1844
Quote:
"They enslaved the Negro, they said, because he was not a man, and when he behaved like a
man they called him a monster."
-C.L.R. James
The Black Jacobins (1938)
Quote:
"The only race is the rat race."
-Wall graffiti, London rioters, 1981
The Western 1 invention of the idea of race in the 17th century, at the beginning of the
Enlightenment, was not merely a degradation of the peoples of color to whom it was
applied.2 Such a degradation had to be preceded, and accompanied, by a comparable
degradation of the view of man within Western culture itself. A society that sees the racial
"Other" in terms of animality must first experience that animality within itself. "If you're
going to keep someone in the gutter," as a black activist of the 60's put it, "you're going to be
down there with them".
Part One, it will be recalled, showed how rationalist Biblical criticism in the mid-17th century
tore away the last of the myths, drawn from Greco-Roman classicism and Judeo-Christian
messianism, which purported to explain the origins of the New World Indians in terms of
traditions then known to Europeans. This critique uninentionally left in its wake a new,
purely biological vision of "natural man" which, in some instances (such as the North
American colonies) , fused with the new white supremacist color-code justifying the Atlantic
slave trade, and the previously unknown idea of race, the identification of cultural attributes
with physical features such as skin color, was born.
It is now necessary to situate the Enlightenment between what preceded it and what followed
it, in order to see how it got caught up in this definition of human beings as animals, which
underlies any association of cultural attributes with skin color or physical features. As stated
in Part One, the Enlightenment as such is neither inherently racist nor valid only for "white
European males". But the Enlightenment today cannot be defended merely in terms of the
Enlightenment alone. Its limited rationality can only be adequately understood and seen in
true proportion by those who see a higher rationality. The best of the Enlightenment, taken by
itself, is disarmed against the worst of the Enlightenment.
An ideology is best understood when seen against the background from which it began, and
against the future in which it will end.
The view of human beings as animals is inseparable from the birth of bourgeois and capitalist
society, which simultaneously gave rise to two interrelated questions which that society has
never solved, and will never solve: the question of the proletariat, and the question of the
underdeveloped world. (By "animality" in this article I mean what Marx meant in the above
quote: someone (i.e. a wage laborer) compelled by society to identify themselves with their
life activity. From this fundamental degradation flow others, namely compulsory
identification by any presumably "fixed" "natural" quality, such as skin color, gender, or
sexual orientation.)
The philosophically-disinclined reader is asked to bear with the following, for in a critique of
the Enlightenment, it is necessary to first set up the question philosophically. Ideas by
themselves of course do not make history. To go beyond the idea of race - the connection
between biology and cultural attributes which, for one strand of the Enlightenment,
succeeded medieval religious identities--the mere idea of the human race would be sufficient.
But before locating these questions in the balance of real social forces where they are actually
decided, it is necessary to know what the questions are. Once they are posed, it will be clear
why the immediate attitudes on race and slavery of this or that Enlightenment thinker are not
the real issue; the issue is rather the view of man of even the best of the Enlightenment which
is ultimately disarmed for a critique of its bastard offspring.
The new society which arose out of the collapse of feudalism in early modern, preEnlightenment Europe, between 1450 and 1650, was revolutionary relative to any preexisting or then-contemporary society. Why? It was revolutionary because it connected the
idea of humanity to the new idea of an "actual infinity".3
What does this mean? In social terms, "infinity" in class societies prior to capitalism is the
world of creativity, e.g. art, philosophy, science, usually monopolized by an elite, as well as
improvements in the society's relationship to nature, first in agriculture and then elsewhere,
usually made by skilled craftsmen. "Infinity" here means innovations that allow a society to
reproduce itself at a higher level, by creating more "free surplus" for its members, or cultural
innovation that anticipates or expresses those improvements in human freedom. (The word
"infinite" is appropriate because the elasticity of these innovations is infinite.) These
improvements in a society's relationship to nature are universal and world-historical,
beginning with stone and bronze tools, and societies that fail to make them run up against
"natural barriers" (known today as "ecology crises") to their existence and either stagnate or
are destroyed, often by other societies. This freedom in their relationship to nature through
such improvements is what distinguishes human beings from animals, which mainly do not
"use tools" but which "are" tools (e.g. beavers, termites) in a fixed relationship to their
environment.
Such improvements, once again, have occurred many times and in many places throughout
human history. But history is also filled with examples of brilliant civilizations (such as Tang
or particularly Sung China) where many such innovations were lost in blocked stagnation or
terrible social retrogression. What was revolutionary about the bourgeois-capitalist society
which first appeared in Europe, initially in northern Italy and in Flanders ca. 1100, was that
these innovations were institutionalized at the center of social life4, as necessity. For the first
time in history, a practical bridge was potentially established between the creative freedom,
previously restricted to small elites, and society's improvements in its relationship to nature.
It was this institutionalization which made possible the appearance of "actual infinity". In the
ancient (Greco-Roman) and medieval worlds, "infinity" was expressed in a limited way. The
Greco-Roman elite had aristocratic values, and considered any relationship to material
production5 to be utterly beneath itself, an attitude which meshed well with a "horror of the
infinite" often expressed in their ideology. Medieval philosophy, largely shaped by Aristotle
in Christian, Moslem and Jewish thought, generally considered an "actual infinity" to be an
abomination, often associated with blasphemy. It was exactly this "blasphemy" which was
developed in the early modern period of capitalism by Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano Bruno,
Spinoza and Leibniz.
While these figures developed the concept of actual infinity in theological or philosophical
terms, prior to the Enlightenment, its implications for the appearance of the concept of race
can best be understood by looking ahead to its further development, in social terms, after the
Enlightenment, from Kant via Hegel and Feuerbach to Marx. Hegel called Enlightenment
(Newtonian) infinity "bad infinity". The practical realization of pre-Enlightenment actual
infinity by Marx retrospectively clarifies the impasse (and social relevance) of Enlightenment
bad infinity, without an even longer philosophical detour.
Many people know Marx's quip that communist man "will fish in the morning, hunt in the
afternoon, and write criticism in the evening, without for all that being a fisherman, hunter or
critic". But the underlying theoretical meaning of that quip is not often grasped; it is usually
understood merely to mean the overcoming of the division of labor, but it is rather more than
that. It is the practical expression of what is meant here by "actual infinity". It is the concrete
expression of the overcoming of the state of animality, a reduction of human beings to their
fixed life activity in the capitalist division of labor. Marx expressed the same idea more
elaborately in the Grundrisse:
Quote:
"Capital's ceaseless striving towards the general form of wealth drives labour beyond the
limits of its natural paltriness, and thus creates the material elements for the development of
the rich individuality which is as all-sided in its production as in its consumption, and whose
labor therefore no longer appears as labor, but as the full development of activity itself, in
which natural necessity in its direct form has disappeared, because a historically created need
has taken the place of the natural one."6 (emphasis added)
The "full development of activity itself" is the "practical" realization of actual infinity. It
means that every specific activity is always the "external" expression of a more fundamental
general activity, having an expanded version of itself as its own goal. In such a social
condition, the immediate productive activity of freely- associated individuals would always
be in reality self-(re)production aimed at the multiplication of human powers, including the
innovation of new powers. Every activity relates back to the actor. "Actual infinity" in this
sense is the practical presence of the general in every specific activity in the here and now.
For the Enlightenment, an object was merely a thing; for Hegel and above all for Marx, an
object is a relationship, mediated by a thing.
The link between the mechanist revolution of the 17th century and the attribution of animality
to human beings is Newton's theory of infinity. This--what Hegel called "bad infinity"-- is the
nub of the question. The infinity, or infinitesmal, of Newton's calculus, which solved the
problems of mathematically describing the motions of bodies in space and time, was an
"asymptotic" procedure (with roots in Zeno's paradox in Greek philosophy) involving the
infinite division of space or time approaching a limit that was never reached. With Newton,
infinity for the West became infinite REPETITION toward a goal that was never reached. (It
was an appropriate conception for an era in which Man was an ideal to be approached but
never attained). This infinity, as shall be seen, expressed the social reality of the new
capitalist division of labor, as theorized by Adam Smith, who praised the social efficiency
achieved by the relegation of the individual worker to the endless, lifelong repetition of one
gesture. With the emergence of this new social phenomenon of the relegation of the atomized
individual to a single gesture, early capitalism transformed the human being into the wage
worker who (as Marx put it in the quote used at the outset) was precisely identified with
his/her life activity, that is into an animal. This was the degradation of the human,
simultaneously with the subjugation of non-European peoples, into which the new concept of
race could move, in the last decades of the 17th century, following the lead of Sir William
Petty's Scale of Creatures (1676)7. The Enlightenment could say that some (e.g. darkskinned) people were animals and beasts of burden because the disappearance, under the
blows of the new mechanistic science, of the earlier, Greco-Roman or Judeo-Christian views
of the human made it potentially possible, in the right circumstances, to see anyone as subhuman, starting with the laboring classes of Europe itself. (This potential would require 250
years to work itself out, from Malthus to the the fascist paroxysm of Social Darwinist "living
space" (Lebensraum) for the "master race").
But it is necessary to be careful; not all Enlightenment theorists of the new idea of "race"
were racists; some used the term in a descriptive anthropological sense without value
judgement. What laid the foundation for the virulent 19th century theories of race was the
taxononomic-classificatory "fixity of species" with which the Enlightenment replaced the
older Christian view of the unity of man: "It is the assertion of biologically fixed,
unchanging'races' with different mental and moral value judgements ("higher", "lower")
which became the decisive criteron for modern racism and a key argument for its
propagation. Bernier, Buffon, Linnaeus, Kant and Blumenbach develop their systems for the
classification and hierarchy of humanity with extremely varied positions on slavery and on
the humanity of "races" both outside Europe as well as among the "whites" who were
increasingly dominant in world affairs"8.
The following is a list of the major Enlightenment theories of race, with author, work and
year of publication:
Georgius Hornius (ca. 1620-1670) Arca Noae (1666) Japhetites (white), Semites (yellow)
Hamites (black)
Francois Bernier (1620-1688) Nouvelle division de la terre (1684) (1684) Europeans,
Africans,Chinese and Japanese, Lapps
Linnaeus (1707-1778) Systema naturae (1735) Europaeus albus (white), Americanus
rubesceus (red), Asiaticus luridus (yellow), Afer niger (black)
Buffon (1707-1788) Histoire naturelle (1749) Lapp Polar, Tartar, South Asian, European,
Ethiopian,American
Edward Long (1734-1813) History of Jamaica Genus homo: Europeans and related peoples;
blacks; orangutans
Johann Friedrich Blumenbach De generis humanis varietatenativa (1775) Caucasians;
Mongolians; Ethiopians; Americans; Malays
Immanuel Kant Von den verschiedenen Rassen den Menschen (1775) Whites, Negroes,
Mongolian or Calmuckic race, the Hindu
Christian Meiners (1747-1810) Grundrisse der Geschichte der Menschheit (1775) “light,
beautiful" race, "dark, ugly" race
(The above, with small additions, is translated from I. Geiss, Geschichte des Rassimus,
Frankfurt 1988, pp. 142-143)
The Enlightenment was, as such, neither racist nor an ideology of relevance only to "white
European males". Nevertheless, it presents the following conundrum. On one hand, the
Western Enlightenment in its broad mainstream was indisputably universalist and egalitarian,
and therefore created powerful weapons for the attack on any doctrine of racial supremacy;
on the other hand, the Enlightenment, as the preceding chart shows, just as indisputably gave
birth to the very concept of race, and some of its illustrious representatives believed that
whites were superior to all others. This problem cannot be solved by lining up Enlightenment
figures according to their views on slavery and white supremacy. Adam Smith, better known
as the theoretician of the free market and apologist for the capitalist division of labor,
attacked both, whereas Hobbes and Locke justified slavery, and such eminences as Thomas
Jefferson, who favored abolition (however tepidly) and defended the French Revolution even
in its Jacobin phase, firmly believed that blacks were biologically inferior to whites.
This kind of polling of Enlightenment figures for their views on slavery and race is, further, is
an extremely limited first approach to the question, easily susceptible to the worst kind of
anachronism. What was remarkable about the Enlightenment, seen in a world context, was
not that some of its distinguished figures supported slavery and white supremacy but that
significant numbers of them opposed both. As Part One showed, slavery as an institution
flourished in the color-blind 16th century Mediterranean slave pool, and no participating
society, Christian or Moslem, European, Turkish, Arab or African, questioned it. Well into
the 17th century, Western attacks on New World slavery only attempted to curb its excesses.
Radical Protestant sects in North America (the Mennonites, then the Quakers) were well
ahead of secular Enlightenment figures in calling for outright abolition, between 1688 and
1740, and a political movement for abolition9, again with religious groups more preponderant
than secular Enlightenment figures, only emerged in the Anglo-American world in the final
quarter of the 18th century, as the Enlightenment was culminating in the American and
French Revolutions. There is no intrinsic relationship between Hume's philosophical
skepticism or Kant's critique of it, and their common belief that whites were innately
superior.10
Any critique of the limits of the Enlightenment, where the question of race is concerned, has
to begin by acknowledging the radicalism of the best of the Enlightenment, for that side of
the Enlightenment, in the 17th and 18th centuries, was radical in relation to the Western
societies in which it appeared11, and also radical relative to many non-Western societies it
influenced. Readers of C.L.R. James' account of the Haitian Revolution will recall his
description of the abolition of slavery in all colonies by the French National Assembly in
February 1794, when the Jacobins and the even more radical Mountain were at the height of
their power, under the pressure of the Parisian masses in the streets. Abolition in Haiti had
been won by the black slaves led by Toussaint l'Ouverture in August 1793, but, threatened by
British and Spanish military intervention to seize the colony and restore slavery, the Haitian
revolutionaries wished to remain allied to France, and wanted abolition confirmed by the
Assembly. Neither Robespierre nor the Mountain wanted it, but the radicalization of the
situation under mass pressure, in the most extreme year of the revolution, forced it on them:
Quote:
"...The workers and peasants of France could not have been expected to take any interest in
the colonial question in normal times, any more than one can expect similar interest from
British or French workers today (James was writing in 1938-LG). But now they were roused.
They were striking at royalty, tyranny, reaction and oppression of all types, and with these
they included slavery. The prejudice of race is superficially the most irrational of all
prejudices, and by a perfectly comprehensible reaction the Paris workers, from indifference in
1789, had come by this time to detest no section of the aristocracy so much as those whom
they called "the aristocracy of the skin"...Paris between March 1793 and July 1794 was one
of the supreme epochs of political history. Never until 1917 were masses ever to have such
powerful influence--for it was no more than influence--on any government. In these few
months of their nearest approach to power they did not forget the blacks. They felt toward
them as brothers, and the old slave-owners, whom they knew to be supporters of the counterrevolution, they hated as if Frenchmen themselves had suffered under the whip."12
Bellay, a former slave and deputy to the Convention from San Domingo (as Haiti was then
called) presented his credentials and on the following day introduced a motion for the
abolition of slavery. It was passed without debate and by acclamation, and was the radical
high water mark of the revolution. As James said, it was "one of the most important
legislative acts ever passed by any political assembly".
It is certainly true that the proto-proletarian action of the Parisian masses in 1793-94, and
their link-up with the overthrow of slavery in San Domingo, went beyond any political ideas
of the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th century13. They were still too weak, and capitalist
society too undeveloped, for them to be anything but brilliant precursors of later revolutions
in which, for brief moments, revolts in the "center" fuse with revolts in the "periphery" and
mark a turn in world history.14 It was not in France but in Germany, over the next two
decades, that philosophers, above all G.F.W. Hegel, would theorize the actions of the Parisian
masses into a theory of politics that went beyond the Enlightenment and laid the foundations
for the theory of the communist movement later articulated by Marx15. Nevertheless,
nowhere did the radical Enlightenment program of "Liberty- Equality- Fraternity" acquire
such concreteness as a program for mass action as in Santo Domingo after 1791 and in Paris
in 1793- 1794; Toussaint l'Ouverture had himself studied French Enlightenment thought.
Thus the "best of the Enlightenment" is revealed precisely by the actions of people who,
influenced by it, were already in the process of going beyond it, with practice (as always)
well in advance of theory. This realization of the Enlightenment, as the revolution ebbed, was
also the end of the Enlightenment, for reasons too complex to be treated here16.The
Enlightenment had foreseen neither the Jacobin Terror nor Napoleon, and could only be
salvaged by figures such as Hegel and Marx, who subsumed the Enlightenment into a new
historical rationality of the kind defended here.
One strand of the worst of the Enlightenment was realized in the work of Thomas Malthus
(1766-1834), laying the basis for an ideology which is still rampant today, and completely
entwined, in the U.S. and many other countries, with racism.
Malthus's basic idea, as many people know, was that human population increases
geometrically while agricultural production increases only arithmetically, making periodic
famine inevitable. Malthus therefore proposed measures for "grinding the faces of the poor"
(as the saying goes), opposing a minimum wage and welfare because they encouraged
profligate reproduction of the working classes, and welcoming periodic epidemic, famine and
war as useful checks on excess population.17 (In contrast to today's Malthusians, such as the
World Bank and the IMF, who preach zero population growth to Third World countries,
Malthus also opposed contraception for the poor because the "reserve army of the
unemployed" kept wages down.) Even in Malthus' own time, innovations in agriculture had
doubled production in England, but Malthus was above all concerned with developing a
"scientific" facade for policies aimed at maximizing accumulation and controlling the vast
armies of poor people unleashed by the early, brutal phase of the Industrial Revolution.
It would be a travesty to call Parson Malthus an "Enlightenment thinker"; he was already
denounced by liberals and radicals of his own time. But his linear view of agricultural
production was a direct extrapolation, in political economy, of the linearity and "bad infinity"
of Newtonian physics and the Enlightenment ontology. Malthusian man was Hobbesian man:
an animal, performing a fixed function in the division of labor in a society with fixed
resources. Malthus was not so opaque as to deny invention, but his linear view, which he
shared with all political economy (as shall be shown momentarily) concealed the reality,
demonstrated many times in history, that innovations in productivity (and not merely in
agriculture) periodically move society forward in non-linear leaps, from apples to oranges, so
to speak. (In the late 16th century, for example, end-of-the-world cults proliferated over the
coming depletion of the forests in Europe's wood-based economy; a century later, inventions
in the use of iron had made coal, not wood, Europe's major fuel, obviating the earlier
hysteria.) Resources, like human capabilities, are not "fixed", but are periodically redefined
by innovation, and major innovation ripples through a whole society, creating the non-linear
"apples to oranges" effect.
The same linearity, however, pervaded even classical political economy, with direct
Enlightenment sources (most importantly in Adam Smith) , from which Malthus may be seen
as an early, but significant, deviation. David Ricardo (1772-1823) was praised by Marx as the
most advanced political economist, the theoretician of "production for production's sake".
(For Marx, by contrast, "the multiplication of human powers", not production per se, was "its
own goal".) But although innovation was far more central to Ricardo's economics, he too
succumbed to the linearity of his premises. Malthus's bourgeois "end of the world" scenario
was overpopulation; for the productivist Ricardo, the unleashed productivity of capitalism
would be strangled by ground rent as poorer and poorer soils were used for raw materials.
Like Malthus, Ricardo failed to conceive of "quantum-leap" innovations that would
supercede the need for specific, limited raw materials. Thus the two major "end of the world"
scenarios produced by 19th century economics grew out of Enlightenment, bad-infinity
premises that saw even innovation in terms of linear repetition. Ricardo culminated classical
political economy's theorization of labor, but the limitations of a bourgeois viewpoint
prevented him from grasping the idea of human labor-power, out of which "apples to
oranges" improvements in society's relation to nature periodically occur18.
Marx's concept of labor-power is the concrete realization, in social terms, of the "actual
infinity" of pre-Enlightenment thought; it is the nucleus of a rationality beyond the
Enlightenment, a rationality centered on the "fishing in the morning, hunting in the afternoon,
and criticism in the evening" notion explained earlier, in which man goes beyond a fixed
place in the division of labor, "fixed" natural resources determined by one phase of
productivity, and the fixity of species in relation to their environment that characterizes
animals. It thereby goes beyond the worst of the Enlightenment, the Hobbesian view of man
which, in concrete historical circumstances, fuses with Enlightenment and postEnlightenment race theory.
The preceding, then, was a "theoretical" exposition of the flaws of the Enlightenment world
view, (the general world view of bourgeois-capitalist society in its progressive phase), which
have disarmed it against race theory and racism, the association of physical features with
cultural traits, and even, in their early phase, contributed to them. It has the advantage of
going "beneath" the wide array of views for and against slavery and white supremacist race
theory held by individual Enlightenment figures to the foundations of a world view they
shared, but it has the great disadvantage of posing "theoretically" the evolution of ideas
which are in fact the product of a shifting balance of forces in real history.
Marx's realization of pre-Enlightenment actual infinity in his theory of labor power
superceded both the Christian idea of humanity and the Enlightenment view of Man in a
concrete-practical view of real people in history. But, as stated earlier, if race were merely an
idea, it could be overcome by another idea. The connection first made by some
Enlightenment figures between biology and culture became socially effective in the 17th and
18th century not as a mere idea but as a legitimation of the Atlantic slave trade, of Western
world domination, and in the U.S., the special race stratification of working people as it first
emerged in 17th century Virginia; it was deflated neither by Marx's writings, still less by the
real movements organized by many of Marx's followers (whose relation to the overcoming of
race was often ideologically rhetorical and practically ambiguous, at best.). The biological
idea of race has been marginalized, but not made extinct, in official Western culture since the
19th century by anti-colonial struggles and the emergence of former colonies as industrial
powers, by the culmination of Western race theory in Nazism, and by the successes of the
black movement in the U.S. in the 1960's, with both national and international repercussions.
It was also marginalized, within the official culture, by a critique launched in the early 20th
century by figures such as Franz Boas and Robert Ezra Park, which began as a distinctly
minority view among educated whites and which increasingly drew momentum from these
events. Nevertheless, beginning in the late 1960's, and accelerating in the climate of world
economic crisis since then, the biology-culture connection and its (usually explicit) racist
edge began to make a comeback in the work of Konrad Lorenz, Banfield, Jensen, Schockley,
Herrnstein, E.O. Wilson, and more recently in the controversy around Herrnstein and
Murray's The Bell Curve19. Biological theories of culture (with no racist intent) are also
reappearing in the utterances of such figures of liberal credentials as Camille Paglia and Carl
Degler.20
The history of the idea of race as the biological determinant of culture after the
Enlightenment is far beyond the scope of this article. After the French Revolution, the
backlash against the Enlightenment took many forms, but the relevant one here was the
intensification of the biology-culture theory of race first developed by some Enlightenment
figures, and relative oblivion for the more neutral anthropological use of the term, not linked
to judgemental color-coded race hierarchies, developed by others, even if still tainted with a
"fixity of species" outlook. But the key point is that when deeply anti-Enlightenment figures
such as Count Gobineau21 (1816-1882) began the intensification of race theory that pointed
directly to fascism, they had already found the concept of race in the Enlightenment legacy.
By the end of the 19th century it was common coin in both Europe and America to refer to
the "Anglo-Saxon race", the "Latin race", the "Slavic race", the "Oriental race", the "Negro
race" etc. with or without (and usually with) judgmental ranking22, and usually assuming a
biological basis for cultural differences. (Phrenology, which claimed to determine
intelligence by skull shape and size, also remained a respectable science until the end of the
19th century.) The admixture of Social Darwinism after 1870 (for which Darwin is not to be
blamed) and the massive land grab known as imperialism created an international climate in
which, by 1900, it was the rare educated white European or American who questioned race
theory root and branch. Forerunners of The Bell Curve routinely appeared in the U.S. up to
the 1920's demonstrating "scientifically" the biological inferiority of the Irish, Italians, Poles,
and Jews, and influenced the Immigration Act of 1924 sharply curtailing immigration and
imposing quotas on such nationalities23. Eugenics accelerated in popularity in the AngloAmerican world from 1850 onward, and Hitler and the Nazis claimed that they took many
ideas, such as forced sterilization, from the American eugenics movement. Margaret Sanger,
the famous crusader for birth control, was a white supremacist, as were a number of early
American suffragettes and feminists24. Some sections of the pre-World War I Socialist Party
made open appeals to white supremacy, and the SP right-wing leader Victor Berger was an
unabashed racist25.
For many of these post-Enlightenment developments, the Enlightenment itself is of course
not to be blamed. Many Social Darwinists, eugenicists, suffragettes, Progressives and
socialists ca. 1900 undoubtedly identified with the Enlightenment and thought their ideas of
"science", including "scientific" demonstration of the innate inferiority of peoples of color,
were an extension of the Enlightenment project, and the preceding discussion shows they in
fact had their Enlightenment predecessors. Nevertheless, the early intellectual debunkers of
this pseudo-science, such as Boas, were also heirs to the Enlightenment. When the
Enlightenment is remembered today, it is not Bernier, Buffon and Blumenbach who first
come to mind, but rather Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, Kant (as philosopher, not as
anthropologist) and Paine, and one could do worse than to summarize their legacy as the
debunking of mystification. The Enlightenment contributed to the Western theory of race,
and the real separation of culture from biology was the work of post-Enlightenment figures
such as Marx, and above all the real historical movement of the past century. Nevertheless,
when the Enlightenment is attacked today by Christian, Jewish, Moslem and Hindu
fundamentalists for separating religion and state, or by the new biologism of the New Right
or the Afrocentrists for its universalism, or by the post-modernists as an ideology of and for
"white European males", it is the best of the Enlightenment, the "Liberté- Egalité- Fraternité"
of the Parisian and Haitian masses in 1794, and the best post-Enlightenment heirs such as
Marx, which are the real targets. Such attacks remind us that, once critique is separated from
the limitations of the Enlightenment outlined here, there is plenty of mystification still to be
debunked.
Originally Published in Race Traitor #7, 1997. Republished for Libcom from Loren
Goldner's website, Break their Haughty Power

1. -One reader of Part One criticized it for Eurocentrism, because it overlooked earlier
color-coded racial systems in other cultures, citing in particular the case of the Indian
caste system as it was imposed by the Indo-european (formerly called "Aryan")
invaders of the subcontinent ca. 1500 BC. Since my argument was that race as an idea
could not appear until rationalist and scientific critique up to the mid-17th century had
overthrown mythical and religious views of man to arrive at a biological view, this
objection seemed highly unlikely. The theoretical foundation of the Indian caste
system does correlate the four "varnas" (which means, among other things, color)
with the four castes. But the hierarchy of "varnas" in India is inseparable from a
similar hierarchy of "purity/impurity" which descends from the Brahmins at the top to
the Sudras at the bottom, not to mention the untouchables who are not even included
in the system. And "purity" for a caste is connected to action (karma), in this life as in
previous ones; thus the Hindu system conceives of someone's birth in the Brahmin
caste as the consequence of "pure" action, and their ability to stay there the result of
ongoing "pure" action, (whereas the Sudra have committed "impure" action)
something totally different from a race system, where no one acquires or loses skin
color by action. As Oliver Cox puts it: "The writers who use modern ideas of race
relations for the purpose of explaining the origin of caste make an uncritical transfer
of modern thought to an age which did not know it. The early Indo-Aryans could no
more have thought in modern terms of race prejudice than they could have invented
the airplane. The social factors necessary for thinking in modern terms of race
relations were not available. It took some two thousand more years to develop these
ideas in Western society, and whatever there is of them in India today has been
acquired by recent diffusion." (in Caste, Class and Race, New York, 1959, p. 91).

2. (Part One of this article, "From Anti-Semitism to White Supremacy, 1492-1676.
Pre-Enlightenment Phase: Spain, Jews and Indians" (Race Traitor #7) argued that the
first known racist social practices were the "blood purity" laws created against
Spanish Jewry in the mid-15th century. As a result, many Jews converted to
Christianity where, as so-called "New Christians", they entered the Franciscan, Jesuit
and Dominican orders of the Catholic Church where their own messianism mixed
with Christian heretical ideas in the evangelization of the peoples of the New World.
One widespread view , among many theories taken from Greco-Roman and JudeoChristian sources, held that the New World peoples were descended from the Lost
Tribes of Israel. These theories were debated for 150 years until the French Protestant
Isaac LaPeyrere published a book The Pre Adamites (1655) in which he argued from
internal inconsistencies in the Old Testament that there had been people before Adam.
While LaPeyrere himself was still completely in the messianic tradition and still
believed in the theological assertion of the unity of mankind, others used his theory to
argue that Africans and New World Indians were different species. Sir William Petty,
in his Scale of Creatures (1676), made the link between skin color and culture,
thereby theorizing for the first time what had begun in practice in Spain more than
two centuries earlier. It is in this way that the idea of race and the Enlightenment
came into existence simultaneously.)
Part One defined "race" as the association of cultural attributes with biology, as it first
appeared in early modern anti-Semitism in Spain's historically unprecedented 15thcentury "blood purity" laws. This association was then transfered to the Indian
population of Spain's New World empire, and then generalized through the North
Atlantic world to legitimate the African slave trade, which greatly intensified in the
late 17th century just as the Enlightenment was beginning. But this evolution did not
just happen. For 150 years after 1492, Europeans sifted through all the myths and
legends of their Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian past to find an explanation for
previously unknown peoples in a previously unknown world. They saw in New World
peoples the survivors of Plato's Atlantis, descendants of a Phoenician voyage or King
Arthur's retreat to the Isle of Avalon, or finally as the Lost Tribes of Israel. By the
mid-17th century, rationalist critique of the Bible and of myth ripped away these
fantastic projections, and inadvertently destroyed the idea of the common origin of
humanity in the Garden of Eden. By 1676, simultaneous with the multiracial Bacon's
Rebellion in Virginia and the Puritan extermination of the Indians of New England in
King Philip's War, Sir William Petty articulated a new view, relegating peoples of
color to an intermediate "savage" status between human beings and animals.

3. Figures who articulated the previously heretical "actual infinity" in the 1450-1650
period, in theological and then philosophical form, were Nicholas of Cusa, Giordano
Bruno, Spinoza and Leibniz.

4. "The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of
production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them whole relations of
society." (Communist Manifesto)

5. -Improvements, such as inventions, in the ancient world, were made haphazardly,
and were often viewed as curiosities, not something to be socially applied in a
systematic way, or were even shunned because of the threat they posed to existing
social relations.
6-K. Marx, Grundrisse, (1973 ed.), p. 325.

6. Petty's book is the first known Western source which both overthrows the Christian
idea of the unity of man and also connects biological features to a color-coded race
hierarchy. "Of man himself there seems to be several species, To say nothing of
Gyants and Pygmies or of that sort of small men who have little speech... For of these
sorts of men, I venture to say nothing, but that 'tis very possible there may be Races
and generations of such"...."there be others (differences-L.G.)more considerable, that
is, between the Guiny Negroes & the Middle Europeans; & of Negroes between those
of Guiny and those who live about the Cape of Good Hope, which last are the Most
beastlike of all the Souls (?Sorts) of Men whith whom our Travellers arre well
acquainted. I say that the Europeans do not only differ from the aforementioned
Africans in Collour...but also...in Naturall Manners, & in the internall Qualities of
their Minds." (quoted in M. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964), 421-422.

7. . Petty's book is the first known Western source which both overthrows the
Christian idea of the unity of man and also connects biological features to a colorcoded race hierarchy. "Of man himself there seems to be several species, To say
nothing of Gyants and Pygmies or of that sort of small men who have little speech...
For of these sorts of men, I venture to say nothing, but that 'tis very possible there
may be Races and generations of such"...."there be others (differences-L.G.)more
considerable, that is, between the Guiny Negroes & the Middle Europeans; & of
Negroes between those of Guiny and those who live about the Cape of Good Hope,
which last are the Most beastlike of all the Souls (?Sorts) of Men whith whom our
Travellers arre well acquainted. I say that the Europeans do not only differ from the
aforementioned Africans in Collour...but also...in Naturall Manners, & in the internall
Qualities of their Minds." (quoted in M. Hodgen, Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth
and Seventeenth Centuries (Philadelphia, 1964), 421-422.

8. -I. Geiss, Geschichte des Rassismus, (Frankfurt, 1988), p. 142. Geiss sees Hume as
the first Enlightenment figure (in 1753-54) who specifically theorizes a racist
hierarchy of color (p. 149); he does not seem to be familiar with Petty's text. I.
Hannaford's Race: The History of an Idea in the West (Johns Hopkins, 1996) surveys
the same period, with somewhat different judgements (cf. Ch. 7), and sees the main
break occuring with Hobbes.

9. In 1780, during the revolution, Pennsylvania, with its large Quaker presence,
became the first North American colony to abolish slavery.

10. E. Chukwudi Eze's Race and the Enlightenment (New York, 1996) is a useful
compendium of little-known texts by Blumenbach, Hume, Kant , Hegel and other
figures, mainly expressing white supremacist disdain for Africans and African culture.
In my opinion, these texts mainly demonstrate that Hume, Kant and Hegel expressed
the limitations of their time, and in no way shows any race- linked implications of the
philosophical works we still read today. (I would be interested in hearing from Race
Traitor readers who think otherwise.)

11. -Figures such as Hobbes, Locke or Hume were all suspected of radical atheism by
the conventional middle-class opinion of their time, still tied to official religion. They
were in reality moderates, deeply hostile to radical popular forces, many of which still
spoke a religious language. The "left to right" spectrum of the 17th and 18th centuries
in no way, particularly in the Anglo-American world, aligns itself neatly with
distinctions between the "secular" and the "religious", as the examples such as the
Digger Gerard Winstanley or William Blake clearly show. The mainstream
Enlightenment always opposed the "antinomian" social radicalism associated with
such figures. (Cf. M. Jacobs, The Newtonians and the English Revolution, 1976).
C.L.R. James. The Black Jacobins. New York, 1963, pp. 120, 138-139.

12. -C.L.R. James. The Black Jacobins. New York, 1963, pp. 120, 138-139.

13. The great majority of Enlightenment figures limited their political aims to a
constitutional monarchy on the post-1688 English model or to a vision of benign topdown reform by Enlightened absolutist despots; the proclamation of a Republic in
France in 1791 was the result of the practical radicalization of the political situation
there and throughout Europe, not a preconceived application of Enlightenment ideas.

14. The radical wing of the French Revolution , the Parisian masses, was crushed in
1794; by the Jacobins, who were in turn overthrown by moderates; after Napoleon's
seizure of power in 1799, France restored slavery in all its possessions and lost 50,000
soldiers in a failed attempt to subdue Santo Domingo. In 1848, when capitalism and
the proletariat were more advanced, a new French revolution (part of a Europeanwide uprising) occurred and finally succeeded in abolishing slavery in the colonies,
after England had done so in 1834.

15. Hegel's fundamental idea that "the real is rational" comes directly out of his
analysis of the French Revolution. In contrast to even the best of the Enlightenment,
Hegel (having the example of the revolution before him, as the Enlightenment did
not) was the first to understand (even if he did not use this language) the
"sociological" truth that a social class (e.g.the Parisian proletariat) is not a "category"
but an act, and that the "truth" of any social class (i.e. the "real") is not its own day-today humdrum self- understanding in "normal conditions" of oppression but the
extremity of what it has the potential to become ("the rational") at crucial turning
points (generally called revolutions). Hegel's own late conservatism and that of his
followers turned the meaning of "the real is rational" into a simple apology for the
existing status quo, cutting the radical heart out of Hegel's original meaning of "the
real".

16. The Enlightenment (at the great risk of oversimplification) conceived abstractly of
Man as "natural man", endowed with reason, and endowed with "rights of man" by
"natural law". The counterpart of this was a conception of societies as initially formed
by individuals who came together in some kind of "social contract"; Enlightenment
theory thus assumed individuals who initially existed independently from society and
history. Society was the "sum" of such individuals. It was a completely ahistorical
view, which is one reason the Enlightenment was so preoccupied with utopias in
distant places, in which Man could be portrayed in harmony with (static) "nature",
and with New World Indians or Tahitians, who supposedly revealed Man "in Nature",
or with the "wild child" raised outside all social institutions. "All men once lived as
they live in America", said John Locke, referring to the American Indian. The
Enlightenment was also preoccupied with drawing up constitutions (as Locke did for
the Carolina colony in North America, or Rousseau for Poland), as if social
institutions were derived from, or could be derived from, "first principles", and were
not, as Vico first argued, a factum, the product of activity. Enlightenment social
thought had an ideal to realize, a human nature that could be distilled and indentified
separate from society and history. Thus Rousseau could conceive this ideal of Man as
something to approach but never be achieved, the social equivalent of Newton's bad
infinity.

17. Cf. the invaluable book of A. Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social Costs of
the New Scientific Racism, New York, 1980, particularly Ch. 4. Space does not
permit a full discussion of the influence of Malthusian ideology today. I will limit
myself to pointing out that John Maynard Keynes, the theoretician of the post-1945
welfare state, explicitly identified himself as a Malthusian. Keynes obviously was not
opposed to a minimum wage, welfare measures or contraception; what he shared with
Malthus was the idea that the buying power of unproductive classes should be
increased to avoid periodic depressions. Malthus and Keynes had in common a
"consumer's" view of the economy, assuming that if demand were maintained,
production would take care of itself. But the underlying world view of both Malthus
and Keynes, as theoreticians of the unproductive middle classes, had the necessary
corrolary of "useless eaters", which in the austerity conditions of the post-1973 period
in the U.S. have mixed with classical racism to produce a "conservative-liberal"
consensus for the abolition of America's (minimalist) welfare state. Bill Moyers'
reportage on teenage parenting among American welfare populations was classical
Malthusian propaganda about the "promiscuous poor" from a "liberal" viewpoint.

18. -One may readily understand the distinction between labor and labor power by the
recent example of the "new industrial countries" (NICs) such as South Korea. Cases
such as this are not merely a question of dropping some factories into a peasant
economy. South Korea emerged over 35 years from an extremely poor, predominantly
rural, Third World country to one which exports high-quality technological goods and
even conducts its own R&D. This was made possible by many things, but among
them were the creation of an infrastructure (transportation, communications, energy
systems) and above all a skilled work force capable of operation modern factories.
South Korea in 1960 had an abundance of in labor, but desperately short of laborpower.

19. After being largely marginalized by official culture in the U.S., many of these
authors were translated into French in the 1970's where they contributed to the rise of
the anti-immigrant National Front, which openly proclaims white supremacy in its
public utterances.

20. -Paglia attacks 50's and 60's left culturalism for overlooking the "dark" biological
side of sexuality; Degler announces his conversion to the "return of biology" in In
Search of Human Nature: The Decline and Revival of Darwinism in American Social
Thought(New York, 1991).

21. Gobineau's book, The Inequality of the Races, which became the manifesto of late
19th-century Aryan supremacy, was first published in 1853.

22. T. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America (New York, 1963), Ch. XIII,
tells the story of Anglo-Saxon race theory. Gossett also traces the history

23. A dense survey of this history is in A. Chase, The Legacy of Malthus: The Social
Costs of the New Scientific Racism (New York, 1980).

24. -Cf. Robert Allen, Reluctant Reformers: Racism and Social Reform Movements in
the United States. (New York, 1975), Ch. 5.

25. ibid. p. 223-227.